Hi, this is Ira Flato. You're listening to Science Friday.

Today on the show, are you part of that viral mouth taping trend? We'll offer some advice

and when and if you should tape that mouth shut. And then open wide for the science of spaghetti.

I was asking every scientist I talked to.

What is it about spaghetti that gets you all so obsessed?

I love pasta.

I love to cook it.

I'll have to make pasta dishes.

There are really two schools of thought about what to do with spaghetti. There's those that

slip the raw spaghetti strands whole into the boiling water. And then there are people like me

who try to break the spaghetti into two pieces so it more easily fits into the pan. But you know what

happens? You find that it always breaks into like

three pieces and never cleanly into two. And it's not just me. For decades, this humble food

has prompted physicists from all over the world to try to understand pasta's mysterious properties.

Why can't you break it into two pieces? And what's in the

secret sauce that makes caccio I pepi so hard to perfect? Well, my next guest wrote about the

scientist cooking up the answers to these questions and more. He did it for a recent piece for

the BBC. Joseph Howlett is math staff writer at

Quantum Magazine based in New York City. Joseph, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for

having me, I'm a huge fan. I want to start with famous physicist Richard Feynman's addition to

the Spaghetti Science Club. Not that I'm surprised, given the fanciful nature of his work, but how did he get

hooked on studying the stuff?

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